“There’s a skill set I always thought you needed to acquire for a job like this,” he said. “How do you know what to do or argue for this or that? It’s an interesting experiment.”
During her recent tour of the sprawling district, Marten has dropped in on dozens of schools. Those visits often start in classrooms but inevitably end with Marten asking to see the principal’s office.
That’s what happened on a recent tour of Perkins Elementary School in Logan Heights, where her request to peek into Fernando Hernandez’s office caught the principal off guard.
His new boss liked what she saw: State test scores, charts showing internal exam results and other academic records were tacked across an office wall in neat rows of printer paper.
“There’s all your data — I love it,” Marten said.
Student performance is increasingly used by schools as an evaluation tool, one that is controversial when tied to teacher appraisals. Marten kept meticulous data at Central, but she is opposed to any formal plan to rate teachers based on test scores.
Marten maintains she has never seen the kind of horrible teacher that critics of seniority-based hiring and firing practices often allude to. But at Central, she said those who couldn’t meet high expectations either left the school voluntarily or changed careers under a process commonly referred to as getting “counseling out of the profession.”
Central used its data as a tool to track student — and even teacher — performance. Other schools, like Perkins, also rely heavily on student outcomes.
While touring Perkins, Marten was drawn to any data she saw on classroom bulletin boards that offered clues to the academic performance of students — from attendance records to individual student reading levels. But she relied on more than the numbers to assess students in one kindergarten class.
She also peppered teachers with questions about what they are doing, why they are doing it and what they need to do a better job.
During that visit, Brandon Del Toro was breezing through “A Tree Horse,” reading at a level well beyond most other 5-year-olds when he got stuck on the word “always.”
That’s when Marten intervened.
“Blend it, try and blend it,” she suggested before eventually whispering: “al-ways.”
Without hesitation, Brandon resumed reading aloud with the cadence of a storyteller.
“You have to know when to help them and when to let them struggle,” she said. “It’s OK to help if that’s what they need to get past an obstacle. If they depend on you too much, then it’s not working.”
Academic changes ahead
After four years of leadership at the hands of an operations man, it may be fitting that San Diego Unified put an educator at its helm since academics will take center stage locally and statewide.
Like other districts in the county and nationwide, San Diego is preparing to implement the Common Core academic standards and accompanying tests in 2014. The new standards push critical thinking skills over rote memorization and will require wholesale changes in everything from instruction techniques to assessment strategies in the country’s first universal guidelines for public schools.