Fueling Schools’ Growth With a Belief in Miracles

FRESNO —  In this season of school reform, amid the noise of overhaul and tinker, Supt. Carlos Garcia clears his calendar of meetings and disappears for hours at a time.

These are the mornings that Garcia roams the bleak streets of this city and makes surprise visits to some of the most beleaguered schools in the state. In neighborhoods not far removed from the rich farm fields, Garcia encounters 100 languages other than English and 95% of the children he sees live in poverty.

Like a salesman on a cold call, the 48-year-old superintendent arrives at each school by himself and without warning. Armed with a notebook and pen, he asks principals and teachers a simple, disarming question: How can we at the district office better serve you?

Garcia’s hands-on approach and ability to articulate a vision have caught the eyes of school districts statewide. His supporters say his eagerness to meet with teachers in the trenches gives Garcia a unique vantage--and the goodwill--to push for important changes.

“I’ve been a principal in Fresno for 20 years and a teacher for 30, and I’ve never had a superintendent visit one of my schools before,” said Bill Walker, principal at Burroughs Elementary. “Carlos Garcia has been here at least three times and he spends the entire morning. These aren’t dog and pony shows. He encourages open talk. It’s a real morale booster.”

From the principal to the woman ladling gravy onto 1,000 plates of turkey and mashed potatoes, Garcia listens to every gripe and suggestion. Then he skips rope with the children and tells the story of a Latino boy growing up poor in the barrios of Los Angeles, who survived half a dozen close calls with arrest and death, not to mention the incoherence of English, to become chief of the state’s fourth-largest school district.

“Are you a millionaire?” one fourth-grader asked him last week. “No, he replied. “Serving kids like you, doing what I love. . . . I’m a billionaire.”

A year before Gov. Gray Davis set performance goals for every state school, Garcia had already stirred up the pot here by instituting reforms that challenged teachers to “make your schools good enough for your own children.”

Each of the 93 schools signed on to a district plans to raise yearly test scores by at least 3%. Algebra is now required for all seventh- and eighth-graders and literacy has become the prime focus of every elementary school, a reflection of Garcia’s belief that if a child leaves the third grade without reading at grade level, he will forever play catch-up.

Although test scores are inching up, Garcia is not universally loved. His critics say he is a dreamer whose pie-in-the-sky ideas, including a plan to turn the district into one big charter school to gain more state funding, often leave him with egg on his face. They say his exuberance has heaped more unrealistic demands on teachers and students. It’s one thing to require algebra and quite another thing to teach it to 13-year-olds who can’t add or subtract, they say.

“Garcia criticizes Gov. Davis for setting unreasonable goals that ignore the realities of our district,” said one elementary school teacher who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “But [Garcia] is guilty of the same thing. He’s stuffing these standards down our throats without the money and resources to achieve them. Teacher accountability is fine. But we’re not miracle workers.”

The 79,000 students who make up the Fresno Unified School District come from neighborhoods that rank as the sixth-poorest in the country, behind only cities such as New Orleans, Detroit and Miami, according to an Education Week analysis. The concentration of migrant students from Mexico in the district, 14%, is one of the highest anywhere.

One of every five schools in Fresno sits in the bottom 10% of comparable California schools, according to state rankings released last week. At the same time, two Fresno schools rank among the 10 best statewide.

Garcia believes that a public school education is the best equalizer in a society in which the haves and have-nots are moving in such starkly opposite directions.

“I don’t see my goals as pie in the sky. If we don’t keep an optimism for children like this, who will?” he said. “Does that mean I believe every single kid can go to college? No. But we have to believe that we can perform miracles.

“How can it be impossible? The most exciting thing on this planet is to learn something new. Our challenge is to make learning relevant to these children. Boredom, that’s our biggest obstacle.”

If Garcia sometimes sounds like a pitchman, he cut his teeth on a corner of Pico and Vermont in Los Angeles, where he began hawking newspapers alongside his three older brothers when he was 5. Their earnings went straight to their parents, Gonzalo and Norma Garcia, struggling factory workers.

“It was a great life,” Garcia recalled. “We were very much loved by our parents and we didn’t realize we were poor.”

He was one of the few kindergartners who couldn’t speak English at Magnolia Elementary School, and he kept getting put in the corner for the sins of a mysterious boy named Charlie. Finally, his father approached the teacher to straighten out the problem.

“Who’s Charlie?” his father asked.

“Your little boy is Charlie,” the teacher said.

“My son is not Charlie. My son is Carlos Arturo Garcia Bustamante Rodriguez De la Fuente De Velar.”

Never Again Known as Charlie

Garcia said he was never known as Charlie again. The family moved to Wilmington after his father landed a catering job at Pan American World Airways. Two of his older brothers, feeling the tug of their native Mexico, moved to Veracruz to go to school. Garcia and his younger sister stayed behind.

It was the late 1960s and he grew his hair to his shoulders and read Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice” and organized protests at Banning High School in Wilmington. After school, he’d get a lift home from his lowrider buddies.

“I’d hop in and after a block or two, it would occur to me: ‘This vato doesn’t own a car.’ ‘Hey man, where did you get this?’ ‘We ripped it off.’ ‘Hey man, let me out.’ Three blocks later, the car was pulled over and the cops were frisking everyone. Grand theft auto.

“This happened more than once, I’m not kidding. Had I stayed in the car a few more seconds, my whole life would have changed.”

Each summer was spent with family in Mexico. The first day back at Banning High, Garcia would get a rundown of what he had missed--the crime blotter of the neighborhood boys who got killed or locked up. Garcia sometimes found himself caught in the cross-fire. He said he dodged several drive-by shootings, calmed a crazed man who cocked a gun to his head and endured a roughing up by cops.

His most heart-pounding adventure, though, came at the urging of his father, who one day threw him the keys to their 1956 Chevy station wagon and told him to drive 2,000 miles to pick up his brother from a prison in Veracruz. Garcia was 16. His father never told him that prison officials had been paid off to free his brother, who was in jail for participating in a college protest.

“It was 4 in the morning when my brother ran out and jumped in the car. For all I knew, it was an escape. He told me to step on it and I stepped on it. It was a four-day trip and I made it back to Los Angeles in 38 hours.”

If not for two teachers--Rita Steele at Wilmington Junior High and Irene McKenna at Banning High--Garcia said, he would never have pursued college and a life in education. They saw past his wise guy act and pushed him. After graduating from Claremont Men’s College in 1976, he began a career that has taken him from teaching social studies and coaching track in La Puente to heading a school district in Fresno.

For years, the Fresno job was held by a string of superintendents locked away in the district office, a building whose cotton candy color and irrelevance to the daily lives of teachers earned it the derisive nickname “The Pink Palace.”

Garcia’s first symbolic act was to paint the building white. Now, he’s trying to tear down the bureaucratic walls. After looking at hundreds of charts and models across the country, he’s ready to take the first bold step of reorganization: assigning downtown-based administrators to the school campuses.

“I guess in my heart I’m still an old radical, and the way I run a school district is a lot like a movement,” he said. “I want my people in the district office to be service providers. It’s a whole different way of seeing their function.”

Garcia, who is being talked about as a possible candidate for schools superintendent in Los Angeles, isn’t afraid to take on the governor and the public for demanding excellence in education but refusing to pay for it through higher taxes.

Given the steep challenges confronting Fresno, he thinks it’s unfair that the district receives only $5,000 per student in state funding, a mid-range amount based on an arcane formula. Some schools with more affluent students receive higher funding.

Even if test scores continue to rise, Garcia said, he’s the last person to praise.

“My job is nothing more than to support the teachers, principals and parents. If test scores rise, those are the people who should take credit for it. Not the superintendent.”