Evening Exchange; Clifford Janey Interview

An educator with a comprehensive plan to save D.C. public schools next evening X-Day. Hi I'm Kojo Nnamdi. He served as district superintendent and chief academic officer of schools in his native Boston Massachusetts. Then he was superintendent of the school system in Rochester New York. He's co-chair of the National taskforce on achievement gaps currently. Dr. Clifford Janey is serving as superintendent of D.C. public schools here in our nation's capital a position he has held since 2000 and for Dr. Janey welcome to even it. Thank you thank you. You're from Boston Massachusetts. Did you attend public schools in Boston I said yes I did. I attended public school throughout all of my time in Boston from pre-K to grade. What made you want to become a teacher what made you want to be involved in

educating children. Actually I started thinking about going to school in a cardiology motherhood and this is when I was in graduate school and was in university and I decided to stay on course with my food and mean education. So cardiology you would have been the Dr. Ben Carson of one of my Heroes Saga Ben Carson of course the great cardiologist at Johns Hopkins University. You started your teaching career in Boston Massachusetts in 1974 when I think of Boston Massachusetts 1974 for those young people who were not alive at that time. I think busing busing in Boston. Tell us what that was about and what it was like. Boston as a city is made up of on claves and neighborhoods defined by essentially race and class at that time. It's a lot more desegregation now but at

that point in time when I started teaching on my first day I had cameramen and newspaper reporters from Japan and France in England in my classroom on the first day of school in 1969 you evah teasing class first day ever teaching class and you got international news. Was it about textbooks wasn't about whether kids were immunized. It was all about whether I could manage what was going on outside in keep something terrible going on outside while people were you know trying to get into the school records and the kids were looking at outside the windows because of cameras with the area and you know there was still that kind of responsiveness and reaction to excitement so we had to settle things down and get back to white residents of Boston. Many of them at that time did not want you and black kids in that school. That's true and I went to Boston Latin School. I wasn't supposed to be there. I grew up in one of the more most notorious housing projects in Boston. What you

earned its reputation over time. And the notorious and I wasn't suppose to be there in Boston Latin School then did to some extent now took pride in. Graduating about a third of the students who study in your class. A third and it wasn't you know it wasn't a bad name given to the school because of dropout rate. It was just the reverse that you were able to survive. Haven't looked to the right and look to the left and to people are gone and you're the only one of the three who remained standing on stage for graduation. So you started to have educational challenges and you have social challenges of a racial nature. Then you look back on that. Did that experience in your view help to mold you to become what you've become today to face adversity. Absolutely. Adversity is going to knock on your door. Even Sometimes adversity gets in sometimes it doesn't but in either case

you have to be prepared. And I think my own personal life and developments in my own life personally as a student. And so it's made a good case for my preparation today. Well people should know that you came all the way up the ladder you were a teacher you were a principal you served in a barrage. Idea of capacities within public schools administration before you became superintendents in Boston and in Rochester and you had from everything your resume says a great record both in Boston and in Rochester. You didn't need to do this job in the District of Columbia has a history of having superintendents for lunch and you had to have known that coming into this job what made you take it. I thought it would be my my great example of service to this country. And I say that deeply from my heart. I had friends who went to Vietnam and God made a choice to go to Vietnam

and died when I taught in Concord state prison a penal institution in the state of Massachusetts at least half of my class was made up of guys I grew up with. I was no smarter than they they were no smarter than I. Circumstances bad choices. They were there and I was still teaching them reading in Congress state prison. So I thought coming to DC and I didn't have to take this job I thought it would be my way of giving back because we need to demonstrate to our kids a value proposition of giving back in providing service to your community. So I see in large part the superintendency is providing service to school communities throughout the District of Columbia. And I did so by choice after having talked to on and off over the past two years I know you as a reflective individual somebody who assess the situations very carefully before deciding what to do. You obviously have to do

that in the District of Columbia. What did you find that you thought would be significantly different between your prior experience as a superintendent and the experience that you were likely to have in the district of law. Oh pluses and minuses. So on the plus side I thought there would be. Significant support that we could galvanize will the reclamation of them just to go on and it's a good gauge on. On the downside. I had read carefully about the deaths of some of the challenges health education economics and I just learned recently what 7 has one sit down restaurant it's Denny's and what he had none. That was a revelation to me and I didn't come with any preparation to know how widespread and how deep some of the challenges are. Some people would say What does the fact with what has only one Ben is and what it

has done. No cafe money was around for a while that I don't know that still exist but what would that have to do with the children in those wards being properly educated. Well you live in a neighborhood and it's reflection of who you watch and if there are services whether there are services in terms of restaurants appropriate number and quality of dental and health care services in the same would be true of schools. You grow up with an inequality and you think your life can be firm somewhere else and your community does not actually reflect the kind of depth that you should have and breath that you should have. And you go elsewhere to seek those kinds of things. And so what we're trying to do is to take a holistic approach to the development of the individual meaning the student in a classroom in a school in a community. And so it's about youth families and communities and the superintendents.

So the leadership the soup you can bring some of the current disparate forces together. As I said earlier because you tend to be thorough you do it would appear take a holistic approach to looking at the school system. However we often get our understanding of the school system from sound bites and you have to deal with the Congress of the United States. The mayor of the District of Columbia the city council of the district the Board of Education of the District of the parents of D.C. public school students and we the media to name a few. Dave if you did you take all of those things into account. And how has that sound byte approach to education affected how you operate now in the midst of the school. Well the sound bites should not in have not determined how we develop and how we implement our work. What's of most concern to us is that we're thoughtful but we're

disappointed and we have the sense of urgency to get it done. We for example reconstructed a plan to have all of New Learning Standards completed and implemented within a two year period. That was math reading social studies and science. I don't think a state has ever done it that fast and that well so we can do it on the quick. Even though there are sound bites you overlook in your work making judgments upon your work. But when you know you've done it write it in the big picture and at the end of a day it doesn't matter what the critics will say so the soundbite that says a particular school or a particular group of schools at the elementary level have children who are all failing in math does not affect you that badly. If you know you have a plan that is comprehensive in place to change that. That's not the way I would say it affects me. It hurts me to see kids fail but I'd rather have

them start off with a new set of learning standards a new rigorous curriculum and a new assessment that will make them college ready and job ready by the time they graduate. It's very different. Kids getting a diploma to go on to college and if they finish it seven or eight years sometimes or they have to take remedial courses once to ruin college. There are over 12 states now that have banned remedial courses for their state universities. So that it's shifting now. And so what we have to do is prepare our students for success because preparation is the way by which they're going to be successful knowing still that there's racism and classism in this world and in this country we have to be prepared to take on that challenge. And you say you bring a certain sense of urgency with what happens you have your day planned one sound bite results and a call from a member of congress member of the merest cabinet

member the city council says we want to have a hearing on this right away. You just saw this in the paper yesterday. You want to have a hearing on it today. How does that affect you greatly. But unevenly and oftentimes without appreciation for the work that you have to do. You have to move your calendar around some very important people parents who in your calendar might have had a principal. Sometimes it's you know negotiable but most of the time if not all the time it's a date certain someone puts a pin in the wall and says Here is the date and we prepare for for those hearings. The preparation for the hearings the hearing itself in the follow up to the you know sometimes taking the day. Well in this town we don't have we're not a state. So you don't have any state mechanism to deal with here as I said we have the Congress that I guess is our equivalent of the state. And then your superintendent of city schools. But there's a debate going on around the country about having

mayors take over city school systems. Where do you stand. I'll let that be decided by elected officials and the general public if it goes to a referendum. I would encourage those who are motivated to look at both sides. It's never a black or white issue it's another never either war. One has to take a look at whether it's appropriate given the context of what is going on in that particular environment in Boston for example the American points. The school board it's called the school committee. And the mare exercises authority because it has a we counseled by by nature and like a mission. It was up against a 13 member voting school committee that if you had nine people elected by geographic region regions and you had four people elected

citywide you would have had 13 people on the school committee in Boston. And when the referendum occurred it was against not only that kind of spread but against some corruption that took place and to get some real bad will that was demonstrated by the school committee. And so you had a referendum about an appointed board taking away the vote against this kind of backdrop. It'll be interesting to see how that kind of interest will play out here because you know you're not talking about the boogie men who on the school board any longer. I'm not talking about that kind of dynamic you had that in Boston I mean there was a time that you need to needed to have a brown bag to get a job as a principal. Brown bag was filled not with sandwiches in Boston. That is correct. However the complaint here has always been that the school system has a bloated

bureaucracy and given the number of layers of bureaucracy that I already outlined in the city as a whole one would think that a superintendent might really like the idea of being able to report directly to one individual. The mayor of the city. Wouldn't that simplify things. There are some advantages that one would have to look at and there are disadvantages. One of the things that I think that was very positive about Mayor Williams his term as mayor while I was here is that we had relationships with city agencies that began to grow in number and began to allow us to do the work very well. One such example was with the Department of Health. Last year we had 96 percent of our kids immunized by the beginning of school. This was last year. And with that kind of statistic we had the highest rate of immunization of urban districts in the country. This year we started school with 98 percent. Now we can get close to

100 percent now. It's really within that region. There are about 400 kids who were not immunized middle school. So allowing us to do things more than just as a function of relationships but structurally made may be helpful but you have to look at the downside as well. You have presented a grand plan for the modernization of schools in the District of Columbia and that will require the closing of some schools the renovation of the building of some new schools. Invariably. And I guess you expected this there were people who say this is not happening quickly enough. Clifford Janey is moving too slowly on this problem. We know that whenever a school is proposed to be closed in the District of Columbia you will be guaranteed to get some opposition from parents and community leaders. How does. Pace and timing of what you recommend. Well I'd like to see it done more quickly. You'd have to adjust the financing to get it done more quickly. Now

that's just the plain simple truth of the matter. In order to shorten and abbreviate the schedule as we have it you'd have to change the way by which you're going to get it financed It's like a 30 year mortgage versus a 50 or something shorter than that you have to look at how the money is going to play out within a shorter period of time. You know you don't control that aspect. No I do not. Well I'm looking at some of the aspects of the things you achieved in the Rochester City School District increased reading and mathematics performance on the state assessments and reducing the achievement gap between black and white students and Hispanic and white students. I guess people here would want you to do something like that. You also. Establish something called a parent Action Center. As a single location for information assistance and workshops for parents. Have you been able to do anything similar. We're opening up three parent family resource and all

this is built on the Boston model and we'll do that in wards 1 7 and 8. It will allow parents to be more familiar with curriculum and learning standards types of items generally types of items that we have in the new assessment in a new assessment in besten country also says the organizing literacy forums for parents and citizens of New State learning standards and performance assessments. I can't think about anything that confuses people as much as standards and assessments in general and the No Child Left Behind Act in particular is a POS. Those kinds of literacy forums in the District of Columbia so people simply don't get impatient every time they see that children are not reading at the level of a certain specific test that they may not know very much about. That's a very good question and it goes to the heart of why we want in we'll have these parents resource and it's not enough. In fact

it's fairly regularly insufficient for individuals to rely upon the media to report with a level of clarity about what we're doing in this kind of area in this kind of area. Really we have to do that we have to take the show on the road. We have to go to communities and explain in with great detail and simplicity what it really means. For example in the new assessment we had an increase of about 15 percent of what they call open ended questions. You know you got to whatever colored suit on a student would have to go into a lot more explaining the context of the suit environment other kinds of questions that are associated. With an open ended kind of framework we need to take that to communities. We need to let folks know that we intentionally increase the amount of rigor in the new assessment

and we get it for good reason. The other thing that I didn't see on your resume were two words that are probably among the most fortunate in the District of Columbia when it comes to the public schools special education. The District of Columbia spends a great deal of its education budget on special education. A lot of that money is spent sending children to special education schools outside of the district. Right. In your modernization plan you talk about building schools that would allow some of those many of those special education students to come back to the district whether they have their children with physical or mental disabilities. And the prevailing logic that I've been reading for the past decade as always said these young people do better if they can be a part of the general school population than if they can be in special schools and then all of a sudden when you proposed this a number of parents have risen up and said no we like our children in the special schools that they're in.

That's where we want them to stay. What's going on. A lot of people want improvement without change. We're going to make improvements with change and we're not doing it just because it's the law. To have students with disabilities learn and at least restrictive environment we're doing it because we believe it's the right thing to do. A society a country region or a city or even a school community should be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable. And I believe that that's that's part of why I am. And if we treat our most vulnerable by keeping them in segregated learning environments and it doesn't mean all students with disabilities would be appropriate we placed in a setting if they are medically involved they may need some treatment that

a regular school environment could not provide with a level of quality. But it does mean that there are lots of students who have mild disabilities in moderate disabilities. And I was of course all build long before the Americans With Disabilities Act ever came. Into existence you know those schools don't contain facilities but you're talking about building schools that would have to sell it is not going to educate us to if the child has a political year to go why shouldn't be part of the debate club. Except we're running out of time and I wanted to get to the general question about superintendent's public impatience. It seems to me that superintendents around the nation are now in position for an average of three to five years. It is my understanding it was lower than the stop down so you have a vehicle.

You're a good director Wally. Wow and you don't even take credit. So while we all framed the last question to go OK. We got with one of the two. OK. Oh good. Too much lip and you want to do the man's left and. Go to the see through rubble for a demo. Them

that's a good chance for them to say good night.