Superintendent candidate knows Boston challenges first hand

At least one candidate for Boston school superintendent already knows how challenging BPS can be: Starting in 2002, he spent six years as principal of the chronically underperforming Dever School on Columbia Point.

In an interview with School Committee members today, Guadalupe Guerrero said his experiences - both good and bad - helped shape the way he took on his next job as an administrator with the San Francisco Unified School District, and how he would try to take BPS into the future.

Over the next three days, School Committee members, parents and students will get a chance to grill the other three candidates for the superintendent's job. BPS will livestream the interviews, between 1 and 3 p.m. The School Committee will vote March 3.

Guerrero, who also has two education graduate degrees from Harvard, says the Dever's ultimate failure - it was taken over by the state two years ago - continues to haunt him.

"It pains me to see that the school went into receivership, because I feel situations like that are preventable," he said.

He said that as he prepared recently for this week's interviews in Boston, he talked to Thomas Payzant, at the time Boston school superintendent and the man who appointed Guerrero to the job. "If things were awry, why didn't you pull me," he says he asked Payzant. "You were doing all that could be expected," he said Payzant, whom he considers a mentor, told him.

Guerrero said the key lesson he took away from his experience at the Dever School was that schools simply can't turn themselves around in a vacuum. A school with consistently poor test scores probably has large numbers of students who are coming to school ill prepared because of challenges at home and on the street.

But at the time, he said, he was basically told to go it alone; BPS and the city provided no "wraparound services" that extended beyond the school day.. He said he worked 12-hour days, six days a week and had to try to raise funds privately for a counselor to help students suffering from trauma that had nothing to do with the school, just to get them to where they could concentrate in class.

He added that he had little staffing flexibility to hire the teachers he thought could best work with the kids at the school. And, he continued, many of the parents who lived at Columbia Point had themselves gone to the Dever and gotten little out of it. There was "no relational trust," and if the parents don't trust the school, their kids probably won't do well, either.

Even with all the challenges, he said, he felt he started the Dever down the right path: A revamped math curriculum became a citywide model and an ESL immersion program better prepared students to mainstream into English than the "early exit" English program the school had before.

And when he left Boston to become a deputy school superintendent in San Francisco, he said, he began to work on programs that would more closely tie schools and students to support services on the outside, by working with neighborhood social-services agencies. "Our families were taken care of so our students could focus on learning," he said.

The Devers experience "informed my work aa a systems leader, as a district leader," he said. "How then can I turn around and support a big set of state identified chronically underperforming schools?"

He said it's worked: What were once San Francisco equivalents of the Dever now have waiting lists and have some of the fastest-growing test scores in the entire state of California.

Guerrero said his general goal for Boston would be to ensure all students "graduate ready for post secondary college or career success."

He said that would involve carefully following students from first grade on, so that teachers and support staff could act on early warning indicators" for individual students before they fall too far behind.

He said that while it's good BPS recently announced a record high 65% graduation rate, that still means "35% of our students in Boston Public Schools are not walking across the stage," and that he would work to figure out what it is about the secondary experience that's not meeting the needs of all students.

That could include offering new forms of education to meet the differing learning needs of students, including online classes, he said, adding he would also work closely with local businesses and colleges to develop educational paths that could lead students into specific fields.

He added that he applied for the Boston job only because it's in Boston - the only other city he would consider working in besides San Francisco, not to mention the one where he met his wife, who is also in education.

"It's only because it's Boston that I've demonstrated an interest," he said. "I know the schools well, I know the folks, I've lived in many of the neighborhoods in Boston."

Also see:
Guerrero's Boston application.
School superintendent candidate saddened by what he sees in Boston.
Superintendent candidate would decentralize Boston schools.
School superintendent candidate says Boston just too good an opportunity to pass up.