San Diego Superintendent Cindy Marten was tapped by the Biden administration to be Deputy Secretary of Education, the #2 job in the Department of Education. The corporate reform lobby was not happy with this choice, and they began making insidious charges that she was uniquely unqualified and didn’t care about equity. All of this was nonsense, of course.
When she was interviewed by the Senate committee, she showed herself to be the well-informed, knowledgeable, thoughtful educator that she is, and it appeared that even some Republican members of the committtee were impressed.
The flimsy claims against her needed to be answered, and it was not her role to do it. Fortunately a San Diego business leader stepped up and dashed all the extremists’ attacks on her record.
Mel Katz wrote in the Voice of San Diego:
After President Joe Biden surprised San Diego with the exciting news that San Diego Unified Superintendent Cindy Marten had been chosen to help lead his administration’s Department of Education, some voiced concerns that she had not had success closing San Diego’s achievement gap between students of color and White students or that she had not paid sufficient attention to equity in schools.
I don’t believe the facts back that up.
Marten has devoted her career to eliminating the legacy of systemic racism within public education. She has challenged her colleagues to create an anti-racist school district, and she has put in place concrete policies to improve the academic outcomes for students of color.
Her success has earned praise nationally from the president of the NAACP, at the state and local levels from leaders like Secretary of State Shirley Weber, state Board of Education Chair and Linda Darling-Hammond and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond. Marten has earned their support from her lifetime commitment to equity. From the time she started a literacy center for low-income families, as a young teacher, to her time as principal at Central Elementary in City Heights, which thrived with improved test scores, high staff morale and increased parental involvement.
The fundamental role of any school system is to educate children, and on that core level, Marten has succeeded where many others have failed. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is considered the gold standard of large-scale assessments, found that San Diego was the only district in 2019 whose tests scores significantly exceeded the average scores of 27 large districts in both math and English language arts on the fourth- and eighth-grade tests. Since 2003, San Diego student scores in fourth-grade math have risen every year except one.
In addition to outperforming the average for urban school districts, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that Black and Hispanic student achievement is increasing faster in San Diego Unified than in just about any other urban district in the country.
A recent study by the Learning Policy Institute found students of color in San Diego Unified schools academically outperform their peers statewide. A companion study by UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools found this success is not accidental, rather it is the result of intentional efforts to provide added counselors and other supports to high-need school communities. San Diego Unified has an equity-based funding model that doubles and triples school-site funding above what the district receives in state allocations for disadvantaged students.
As San Diegans, we can be grateful for all that our students have achieved under Marten. As Americans, we can be optimistic about what she and Miguel Cardona, Biden’s education secretary nominee, will be able to accomplish at the national level — for all children.
Mel Katz is executive officer of Manpower. He founded the Business Roundtable for Education at the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce and e3 Civic High, the charter high school in the Central Library. He co-chaired San Diego Unified’s construction bond campaign, Proposition M, and its Graduation Strategy Committee.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
She’s not lockstep pro-charter/voucher, anti-public school enough.
Any deviation from the ed reform agenda is harshly punished. Must have the “correct” resume- obligatory TFA training, followed by brief revolving door stint in government, followed by lifetime employment at ed reform think tank, lobbying group or university department (must be Gates, Walton, Broad or Koch funded).
Founding a charter school is a guarantee of employment, but one MAY work for a public school system, but only IF entire tenure in public school system is devoted to bashing public schools and replacing them with charters/vouchers.
Echo chamber. It’s a club and she’s not in it.
You are not the only person that is tired of the lies of the echo chamber and frustrated by the endless profiteering and political manipulations of the charter lobby. In this excellent post Jan Resseger says we need a massive national campaign to protest school privatization. Without doing something more attention grabbing, supporters of public schools will continue to win small victories, but they may continue to lose more ground while the public barely notices. .https://janresseger.wordpress.com/2021/03/31/29292/
years of small victories up against huge takeover plans — and exactly right, the public barely notices
Marten is wise to include the families of Latino students. One of the best ways to get foreign born parents on the side of public schools is to offer outreach to families. The ESL teachers in my district held periodic family meetings on a Sunday afternoon. We offered babysitting for children while parents met to hear about opportunities in the schools. We also discussed topics that parents wanted to discuss, and we brought in some speakers that could speak to them about mental health and services the state offered. The ESL teachers and some social workers volunteered their time. Sunday afternoon was the only time during the week that parents were not working. These meetings were very successful while parents received useful information, participated in lively discussions and better understood the schools and their resources. Parent outreach promotes understanding and trust from parents that are often overlooked due to the language barrier.
“[S]ome voiced concerns that she had not had success closing San Diego’s achievement gap between students of color and White students or that she had not paid sufficient attention to equity in schools.”
Translation: Some complained that she did not jump onto the high stakes testing bandwagon or that she insisted on educating all San Diego students instead of denying many of them opportunities with the misuse of test scores.
Simplified translation: Some whined that she did not give their companies money and power.
Oversimplified translation: Some fussed she was not a sun-slapper or a self-soiler.
Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward, by Gwendolyn Brooks
Say to them,
say to the down-keepers,
the sun-slappers,
the self-soilers,
the harmony-hushers,
“even if you are not ready for day
it cannot always be night.”
You will be right.
For that is the hard home-run.
Live not for battles won.
Live not for the-end-of-the-song.
Live in the along.
Thank you, LCT, for a sage comment.
The charter-voucher crowd use the achievement gap to sell their wares but they haven’t closed it either.
They lie.
I haven’t seen her Senate testimony. I’ll look it up. My impression from what I’ve read about her is that she’s an ideologue in the vein of NYC’s recently departed Richard Carranza. A defense of her devotion to making San Diego an “anti-racist district” reinforces that concern rather than allays it.
Cindy Marten is no ideologue. She is a hands-on educator who listens to teachers, students, and parents and respects them. Unlike Carranza, who bounced through three districts in less than 10 years, she dedicated herself to making San Diego the best urban district in the nation.
Thanks for your perspective, Diane. I’ll listen to her testimony and consider with an open mind.
I had concerns too, until I was reminded about how San Diego avoided so much of the corporate nonsense Los Angeles suffered and suffers. I taught in both cities. The difference is stark.
San Diego went through its horrible “reform” era in the late 1990s-early 2000s.
In my book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” I wrote about the corporate takeover of San Diego; the appointment of a lawyer to run the district, the assembling of vast sums of money from Broad and Gates to subsidize their experiment in top-down management, the brutal treatment of dissenting teachers, etc. When the “reform” board was voted out, the district brought in Carl Cohn to stabilize a deeply demoralized staff and restore a semblance of democracy. The new board was very union-friendly and they picked Cindy as Superintendent.
Yes. Los Angeles is still inundated with Broad and Gates bribe money.
The corporate “reform school” lobby’s insidious and false charges directed at Cindy Marten reveals that the Reform school Lobby is paid by racist, fascist, greedy puddles of walking puke