During the recent Emerging School Models event at Harvard we had the great fortune of sitting down with Alberto Carvalho. Mr. Carvalho currently leads the Los Angeles Unified School District and formerly led the Miami-Dade system which was lauded as the leading urban district in the United States of America. You can watch or listen to the full episode or read the condensed version that follows:
Caitlin: We're back at the Emerging School Models conference, and we're here today with Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. We're excited to hear about your experiences as superintendent of Miami-Dade of Los Angeles. To start us off, I would love to hear you talk about quality. Quality, of course, matters. Are there any life experiences that you've had that have influenced your definition of quality and what quality looks like in your life and in your work?
Mr. Carvalho: Certainly, I can give you a number of examples. You know, let me begin with my own very humble start in life. Education was always important. Unfortunately, education was not necessarily available to my siblings in a way that it was available to me. Miss Natalia, who was my first through fourth grade teacher, was a highly effective teacher who saw me, acknowledged me, made me believe in my own worth, and therefore I connected with her. You cannot teach the child whose heart you don't first touch. And it worked for me and fortunately did not work for my other siblings. I was the only one to graduate high school. And we're a family of six.
And of course, as an immigrant to this country, [during] my first year as a teacher, I was confused by the fact that in the richest country in the world, there could be two coexisting realities regarding quality education, effective teaching, quality schools, and quality resources. And often what divides those two realities was zip code. No child should be arrested into a quality of educational program based on space, or geography limitations.
Caitlin: Are there specific impediments that you've had to either eliminate entirely to achieve the end result that you hope to get?
Mr. Carvalho: So, number one, there are always impediments, right? And there's always a challenge, always a gate, always a wall, there's always some degree of resistance to innovation, to opportunities that can be offered to kids. And sometimes the pernicious attitudes, belief systems, or just a love of the status quo gets in the way of what would ultimately benefit a child.
So, if you possess a position of leadership, it is your responsibility to dismantle those builders of status quo, of maintaining the comfortable zone just because it benefits some, sometimes at the expense of the child. So, I can recount and recall instances in Miami where, you know, we fought the good fight. You know, we expanded diverse opportunities in education for children.
When I became superintendent, only about 27, 28% of students were enrolled in nontraditional program, whether it was offered by the district or other publicly funded opportunities. By the time I left, in excess of 75% of students were availing themselves of educational opportunities based on their own choice, and it covered the wide array - a kaleidoscope of offerings, anything from schools within schools, small schools, magnet programs, career technical educational programs, independent charter schools, district managed charter schools.
We actually, as superintendent, I started a new school model that previously did not exist with the district becoming the sponsor of a charter school whose business responsibilities were provided by the district, still with relative autonomy in the decision making process. Single gender schools. So, we got pretty close, I think, to the true definition of a portfolio district offering multiple opportunities for parents and students. And I think the result was confusing to some, but I think in the end advantageous to students. It was that the positive (I wouldn't say competition) but the positive elevating of best practices based on tangible results led other schools to want to amplify or replicate those successes by lifting best practices and transporting them to their own schools. And I think that was a very, very powerful dynamic.
Other challenges? You know, I think that often in the field of education we create a large portion or share of the problems we face. We make political decisions about something, and then we have to stick to our corner and fight for our corner without ever recognizing that there are perhaps best practices elsewhere. And we see that across the country.
Education has become very politicized. However, this is like the third presidential election cycle where education, you know, relatively speaking, doesn't have a voice. It's not discussed. You have to go back, you know, a number of years to see the federal government actually being bold, whether we like it or not, in in the sphere of education. I think that that is a dangerous position for a country like the U.S. to maintain. We do not discuss education at the highest levels of political power.
Shaka: You don't hear many public school superintendents talk about options and choice in a way that's amicable. What would you say to colleagues who are taking more of a defensive posture, where they sort of feel like every student should be at a “fill in the blank” school district school?
Mr. Carvalho: Sure. Look at Miami. There's results. And over not just a brief period of time where you saw, you know, a bump in scores and you saw regression back to the mean. But look at this natural, progressive evolution of improvement in Miami-Dade over a 14 year period that took the third largest school system in America from a graduation rate of 56% to over 90%. The complete elimination of F rated and degraded schools. The narrowing of the achievement gap, particularly for students of color, students in poverty, the improvement in AP participation and performance number one in the country.
I mention that because that was achieved during a time period where we empowered communities, empower parents and students with the ability to make decisions about the education that would best suit them. We try to eliminate the politics from the process. And as I said earlier, we were very adamant about creating high quality educational options within the communities where the kids left to not forced to travel two hours a day by bus to get to those high quality programs. We franchise the high demand, high quality programs that everybody wanted, but very few were able to get into. Why not replicate, you know, the highest performing schools that really empower a certain demographic profile that for many years has been left behind? And we did that successfully.
Now, in L.A., it's a different dynamic. You know L.A. probably has one of the most robust portfolio district experiences in the country with a huge number of magnet programs, a pilot, programs of autonomous schools, semi-autonomous schools of independent charters, affiliated charter schools. And we have seen less of a performance improvement over time. But that's not a function of options and choices available to parents of students. I believe it was a function of a lack of system wide coherence around curriculum offerings, standards and the alignment of what's taught to the standards, and the ability to actually gauge over time through interim assessments where students were, how they were doing that school year, making progress or not, and then providing the wraparound services that personalized and individualized the experience for the students. We've addressed that.
And what I can tell you is in a very brief period of time, we're now beginning to see exponential growth, particularly for the schools that never achieved, the 100 priority schools report directly to me.
First time this happened in many, many years, every single grade level in reading and mathematics, positive improvements in terms of reducing the distance from standards and the percentage of students meeting and exceeding standards two years in a row.
Shaka: What does parent engagement look like? What is optimal parent engagement like? I think we often you hear teachers, you hear educators, particularly at a low performing school, lament: I wish we had more parent engagement.
Mr. Carvalho: Until the parents show up.
Shaka: Until the parents show up. How do you think about optimizing parent engagement?
Mr. Carvalho: I'm going to give you an answer probably a lot of people won’t like. I believe in demand driven reform. Empower people with the knowledge and the skill set to make demands. Strengthen their ability to make demands of the system. Government systems, particular large systems don't move easily. They're not that nimble. And the response time to demand can be rather long. So that's why in Miami-Dade and in Los Angeles Unified, we launched the parent Academy. And the parent academy had one single goal empower parents with dangerous information that would put them in a position of knowing the system, understanding the system, being able to compare, assess, analyze, and then make demands on a basis of what their children may not be getting and should be getting.
Well, empowering parents into being fiery and fierce fighters for their kids is one of the strongest ways they can enact on education reform. If you do reform only from within we've seen what happens – you know, the superintendent leaves and that reform goes with the superintendent. Effective reform is based on good practices, best practices, peer reviewed research, that which works.
And we know what works: empowering parents to provide the external support and creating partnerships with community-based organizations to sustain the narrative. That's how you get there. I was very proud of Miami Dade. Our parent academy circulated in excess of 100,000 parents per year. We are we are rapidly reaching that that level of participation in L.A.
What I don't subscribe to is the typical spaghetti dinners or the talking head of a principal or a superintendent just addressing people. When you address people, you're not impacting people. You need an organic process of parental engagement.
Caitlin: You were the leader of that those achievements. How do you create an environment where with so many different parties and pieces and players, you are able to innovate? How do you as a leader create these environments where achievements like the ones you just mentioned, are able to be?
Mr. Carvalho: I think your question is important. This question was, how do you move a large mega district like Miami-Dade or L.A.? Well, surround yourself with zealots who are examples of the perfect balance of belief, skill, and will. You want believers in the cause you fight for.
Secondly, you want extremely skilled people, people who have content knowledge, who have practice experience.
Thirdly, and I think this is key because you can get the person who is a believer, you can get the person who actually has all the education and experience, but you need people who have a strong will set, because the will is the forceful courage you need to do the work at high level of fidelity regardless of the threat, the pushback, regardless of those who love the gravitational pull of the status quo and are afraid to change or afraid to innovate.
So, in both instances, Miami and L.A., we were adamant about creating a very narrow path that would describe what our work was. What that means is don't have a strategic plan that nobody reads. That's 150 pages long with dozens of goals. We have four goals, that’s it! We're going to boost numeracy, literacy, we're going to improve graduation rates and post-secondary opportunities, and we're going to stabilize the mental well-being of kids.
Then you build an army of believers that can actually implement and act upon the strategies that will get us to those goals in a very, very short period of time. Then we challenge ourselves periodically on the three A's, you know, is what we're doing working. So do we need to adopt more of what we're doing? We need to adapt to the circumstances we see? Or do we have the courage and this is a an issue across the country to actually abandon that which does not work.
The cycles of improvement work in a classroom. They work in a school. They certainly work with an administrative team. You need to create a course of rational support for your work that transcends the school district, community-based organizations, philanthropy, labor, elected officials, parent organizations, the business community, the faith based leaders. And then lastly, you need to be able to demonstrate through your work that you have meaningful connections with students. They are the end users of what you do. So student voice empowers. Student voice is important to us.
And then lastly, you know, I'm not a data driven person. I'm a data informed leader. Data by itself does not drive me. You know, if data alone drives you, I'd be concerned, right? Data informed? Yes. I analyze data, I read data, I interpret data. But at the end of the day, the data alone is not going to win for me. I juxtapose the data to condition to practices, and then I make the decision about how we react to that data. And we have the courage to use data in a very meaningful, powerful way that informs the work, whether it is good or bad. You put those elements together and rarely is the outcome something short of success (if you're honest about the work).
Caitlin: Just a follow up to that. We talk a lot about levers you can pull or push something if something seems to be contributing to the end goal that you're wanting the success of students, the end users, you'd want pull it, you'd want more of that. And if there's something that seems to be specifically stopping or halting some of those successes, you'd push it. Does anything come to mind that would be a lever you would push something that you think right now that's happening that we need to stop in order to achieve either the goals that we're talking about or in order for you to be able to do more of the work that you just described?
Mr. Carvalho: Sure. You know, right now we're dealing with the consequences of a very prolonged social isolation as a result of the pandemic. Extremely high chronic absenteeism rates across the country. And that was the condition that I found when I arrived in L.A. 50% of the kids were chronically absent. Average daily attendance was below 80%. And the academic performance after the first assessment, post-pandemic state assessment, revealed 6 to 7 years of true academic loss.
So let me speak about attendance. The best strategy that was being used were typical phone calls to kid’s homes. I don't know about you, but when somebody calls me, whether it's a telemarketer or my banking institution or somebody trying to sell you a timeshare somewhere, you're automatically going to be turned off. It's not the most meaningful connection.
We decided to pivot, abandon that practice. Still make calls, but if that's your only strategy, it's not working. And we pivoted towards a new initiative [called] “I Attend,” that put me, board members, hundreds of workers on the streets knocking on doors. And one year we knocked on 34,000 doors. I'm assigned 30 students. A year later, chronic absenteeism was reduced by 50%. Average daily attendance was restored to pre-pandemic levels because those knocks on doors was not just an invitation to go into somebody’s home: I showed up. A psychiatric social worker showed up. The team showed up, and we were able to, at that moment, understand the root cause and bring solutions to that.
Shaka: Superintendent Carvalho, this has been a true gift and a pleasure for us to chat with you about the things that are happening for kids. We wish you, every success for the 550,000 students in L.A. Unified. We hope that you continue to do great things. We really want to just thank you for being with us today.
Mr. Carvalho: And I'll leave you with one thought. In a time of dissention at all levels across the American spectrum today, one could easily conclude that the solution resides with education. It is still that one environment where we have the greatest chance of bringing kids together. And I so believe in that, not only through my own personal experience, but also because I believe fundamentally that education and American democracy are two sides of the same coin. I don't know of a democratic institution that succeeds and thrives, absent education. So, education and those who dedicate their lives towards enabling it is the best protection of our nation. Democracy is not just about reading, writing and mathematics. It's about expanding the possible – expanding the possibility of young people while elevating ideals that I think we all can subscribe to. So, thank you for the opportunity.
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